game guide

It has taken the better part of year, but sporadically picking away at it, this jRPG on the Playstation 3 is finally starting to take root at our house.

That’s right, after logging nearly fifteen hours of sporadic gameplay over the past nine or ten months (summer doesn’t count!) the kid’s comfort level finally elevated to the point where she nabbed the controller and wanted to help move the game forward.

Grinding Ni No Kuni

I may have alluded to this game a couple times in that past year. One part modern role playing video game and one part Studio Ghibli anime film, all of it geared at a pre-teen demographic, the game caught my interest a while back and I picked up a copy so that Claire and I could share some proper gaming time together. With Studio Ghibli involved I knew there would be an awesome story layered below the pretty graphics, and while some of their stuff deals with complex themes, they don’t cross into the realm of crude or graphic… so, kid-safe.

We’ve been poking at it. We’d load up the game for an hour here or an hour there, and pick our way through the story. And it captured her. She was getting it, remembering key characters and important bits of the story as we progressed.

Lately, she’d sit with the strategy guide on her lap, a bit of an indulgent purchase I’d made to see if I could coax her out of her mostly-passively-watching state of involvement. She turned out to be a bit of an elegant strategist, making notes of enemy weaknesses and suggesting battle tactics whenever we squared off against a random baddie.

“No, Daddy! I’m too scared.”

But… always watching, never playing. No matter how often I tried to shove the controller into her hand: “No, Daddy! I’m too scared.” She say.

This past weekend something changed. I might have been because we’d cranked our level up to a point where battles were becoming routinely balanced in our favour. Or, perhaps she’d started to become more confident in how the game was played and that losing a fight didn’t actually mean anything bad was going to happen in the real world. Or, maybe the strategy book had planted enough raw data into her sponge-like head that she was inspired to put it to use. Who can say, but a moment arrived quite suddenly on Saturday morning after breakfast when she reached over and asked if she could “try fighting a monster.”

“Of course…”

And next thing you know she’s been planted on the couch for over half-an-hour on a very chilly stay-inside-sorta-day, just happily level-grinding up our characters. All by herself, and bragging about how great she is at it, too. Then suddenly I realize the implications: I get to be the guy who’s begging for a turn while my daughter has all the fun.

I haven’t forgotten you, Skyrim!

I’ve just had other things going on. Running. Living. Being outside in the real world. I know you’ll understand.

Tomorrow being the one year anniversary of the release date of one of my (recent) favorite game titles, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, it has been on my mind that despite last winter’s minor obsession with the game I haven’t actually cracked it open in a very long time. In fact, according to Steam, I hadn’t even loaded so much as the title screen since last April, and even then I think it was just to run the updater and see if anything interesting happened.

I decided, what with the bitter cold, snow, and otherwise quiet and free-time-filled morning I was having on this long-weekend Saturday, that I would sneak some time for the game, open it up for another quick peek in the vast and crazy world of Skyrim, and see how all my old NPC pals were faring with their epic dragon war, and such.

It took fifteen minutes to download all the updates, convert the save files, and churn through whateverness before I once again found myself standing on a stone bridge in the middle of some mountain pass being pummeled with arrows.

That’s right: I left myself in an oddly precarious position last time I played, apparently in the middle of some pitch battle and under attack from some unseen enemy.

Here I was, trying to orient my near-invincible, uber-powered-up character and re-familiarize myself with the long-forgotten control scheme, and some dude in the bushes was taking me out one ping at a time.

And then another familiar screen popped up: I got killed. Oops… and reload.

No use re-starting my adventures on a completely sour note.

Let’s start this again: I load back into the middle of a arrow-fight and immediately turn tail and run off down the path. No use re-starting my adventures on a completely sour note.

Last time I played I — apparently — was on my way to some distant corner of the map to visit a city that (in my 60+ hours of game play) had not quite got around to checking out yet: Markarth, a corrupt little hamlet nestled into the side of a mountain, a town who’s economy wrapped neatly around the local silver mine, and a town which, upon my entering, was suddenly shaken by a brutal late night murder in the middle of the street. Insert climactic musical score here. Oh, how convenient that I had arrived just at that moment to be lured into investigating and unraveling the deep seated corruption of the local leader and hidden indentured servitude of the townsfolk.

I was immediately tasked with talking with a whole list of people, digging deep into hidden conspiracy, and using my wits and strength to bring down the mine owners.

I went and explored a haunted house instead. Yeah. So, I didn’t want to jump into a grand and epic major story-line plot quite yet… sue me.

Minor side quest? Sure, not problem. Explore this mysterious house, venture off into the wilderness to take on some low-level villains, rescue a weird-priest-kinda-guy from a mystery fortress, and earn some wacky artifact-slash-weapon.

Not bad for an hour’s play-time. And I brushed the cobwebs off the ol’ archery and two-handed sledgehammer skills, too.

Of course, back in the real world I dug out my trusty game guide. I don’t know that I stirred any controversy with my post, but over four hundred people have read my little article on the value of using a play guide while gaming. And for those folks, here’s yet another argument from experience: when you turn the game off for the summer and then try and go back to it eight to ten months later, the game guide comes in pretty handy in figuring out what the heck was going on again. I don’t exactly file the plots of this huge, epic story in my head for long term storage, dig? And that telephone-book-sized sheath of paper just came in really useful to solve some sudden and possibly important questions: Like, why exactly am I wandering through this mountain pass again? And, is leading some random guy off to be sacrificed to some random alter I found in a random and mysterious abandoned house a good thing for my character? Or, is it even random?

In the end I wandered back out into the streets of Markarth and saved my game. I’m not planning on falling into another deep obsession with the world of Skyrim this winter. I’ll dabble, sure. And the game is designed to suck you in and latch onto your mind so that you start thinking about it more than you really should, planning your next strategic play, figuring out the proper path for upgrading your character with skill points or even writing about your imaginary adv…

Ah, crap…

I’ve got no affiliation, association, or connection with any of these games. Screens have been captured during my own personal game-play using Steam (press F12) and this is all just my random, amateur opinion. Share and Enjoy.

About this Blog

This is a personal website to which I've been posting for over sixteen years. It's neither news nor journalism; It is often trivial fluff, but occasionally perspective and opinion.

At its heart, this blog is little more than my odd collection of words, photos, thoughts, vents, ideas, fiction and assorted mental farts, a collection that happens to live online in the form of a blog.

I tend to fill this space with musings of little value to anyone but myself. Occasionally others find what I write to be interesting, and read it or share it. But usually it just is what it is: My ramblings.

So, share and enjoy... or just move along.

Narrow Your Experience

Categories

Categories

Archives

Archives

Disclaimer

The opinions herein are my own wistful musings and have absolutely nothing to do with the opinions, policies or ideas of anyone else including employers, family, friends, or otherwise. Read my EULA before you read anything else… or bug off.

Even More Details

8 Clicks From Nowhere has been posting since 2001 and maintains public online archives for 6177 days (about 17 years ) of content, from April 20, 02001 through March 18, 02018 It was calculated in precisely 0.872 seconds by a mechanical steam-powered wordpress difference engine.

A product of Canada. 8 Clicks From Nowhere is currently produced from Edmonton, Alberta but has been written from too many places to list. Share and enjoy!